Bots or Bills, what is really giving Musk second thoughts about Twitter

From poop-slinging to cocky responses, the repartee on Twitter from Elon Musk is casting a doubt on whether this eccentric billionaire will actually buy the social media platform.

The War on Bots

Earlier, Musk replied with a poop emoji after Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in a tweet thread mentioned that it would be difficult to conduct an external audit on the platform's spam accounts. Musk and Agrawal have been in a wrangle lately as the Tesla CEO expresses his doubts over the success of the deal if Twitter fails to provide proof of spam accounts.

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But is the real problem debt?

Underpinning the deal is a $13 billion debt bill that’s looking like a bigger burden by the day. Twitter’s annual interest expense to around $900 million, while Bloomberg Intelligence sees $750 million to $1 billion.

With numbers like those, Twitter looks poised to burn cash, boosting the pressure on Musk to transform the company by finding new sources of revenue and slashing costs.

Musk wanted to eliminate spam Twitter accounts

Well, one must remember that Musk offered to buy the social media giant for $44 billion as he decided to eliminate bots from Twitter. Even after buying the largest stake in the company, Musk tweeted, "If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”

So, now the question arises, if he already knew about the problem of bots -- and Twitter has always said the real number could be higher even though their best estimate calculated it to be sub-5 percent -- then why didn't the eccentric billion do the due diligence before announcing the deal.

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We must also look at the deal offer which was made at $54.20 per share. Since then the prices of tech companies have corrected sharply and hence a $54 per share seems like a significantly premium offer for a share that has already been trading at $38.